by Larry Johns
What began as a drizzle, strengthened quickly to heavy rain in association with failing light. And a wind sprang up from nowhere. Soon, within minutes, and in a landscape as dark as a weakly moonlit night, it was a torrential downpour. The wind, confused and directionless, rose to a gale and the grape-sized pellets of water sliced obliquely over the ground, exploding like tiny grenades against the exposed tree trunks. I moved the party and the vehicles some fifty feet back into the forest, but still the rain-bearing wind found us. We caped up and settled down to wait.
Out in the open, the elephant grass, only barely visible through the dark torrent, undulated drunkenly, whipping this way and that, like seaweed at the mercy of strongly conflicting currents. The sound, for a time, was demoniac; a prolonged burst of enthusiastic applause from a million clapping hands and whistling mouths, overlaid with kettledrum thunderclaps and flashes of sizzling, ripping lightning. I sat in my jeep with my cape pulled up around my head and I just hoped to Christ that the pilot was up to it.
The jeep rocked to the buffeting and it grew darker and darker and for at least twenty minutes it was as black as night. I tried not to think about Piet Vryburg. Either the pilot knew his job, or he didn’t.
Then, quite suddenly, and in the usual fashion of a tropical storm, the wind eased and the rain fell vertically out of a lightening sky. I waited. There seemed no point in rushing back out into the open. A few minutes later the rain stopped and the sun again crashed down onto the elephant grass. We pulled ourselves together. I de-caped and turned the key in the ignition and the engine barked into life. The ground was now like a skidpan and the jeep was all over the place as I eased back out into the elephant grass. Kimba was doing his show-off thing again. His vehicle roared past me, hit a stone, turned a complete circle and came to a skittering halt. His men, all of them Kangatzi, fell about laughing. I figured, hoped, that would calm him down for a spell. Certainly, had I been one of his detail, I might have placed my panga where it would have inflicted the most pain. His attitude to the promotion had surprised even Augarde, who was already apologizing to me. I had shrugged it off, but it was beginning to grate. The only thing about it was that the Kangatzi seemed, for God alone knew what reason, to respect the man’s power, if not his personality - bricks in the grass notwithstanding. At all events, they did what he told them to do. And that, for the moment, was what mattered to me.
Eastwards, the sky was a rearing mountain of black, scudding cloud. Overhead and to the south and west, it was a clear blue, the sun burning down and already drawing billows of steamy mist from the saturated ground. I eased my jeep alongside the smoke canister and stopped. Then the men appeared, their boots making sucking noises in the mud. Kimba left his vehicle out in the grass. The capes were thrown down onto the cleared area of ground and the men, Kimba included, were soon squabbling over the peculiar dice game that seemed to fill the Kangatzi’s every off-duty moment.
I had chosen Kangatzi for the landing area duty for the simple reason that they would have to remain out there for some time. Not only were they almost immune from the Simba superstitions, they also had nowhere to run; except into trouble.
The radio burst into life and I breathed a sigh of relief. “Parka! Parka! Parka!”
I lifted the microphone. “I have you, Parka.”
“Five minutes, Base. Will you mark now?”
“Roger, Parka...Hey, you lot! Get out of the way!” As the men scattered I yanked the cord on the canister. It began to billow thick blue smoke. Into the microphone I said, “You have blue smoke, Parka...Repeat. You have blue smoke.”
“Received, Base. Marker is blue smoke. Stand by.”
The chopper was a Russian-built Mica-Ten, and it had SHAMA ESTATES marked on its belly. It settled into the cleared area and I saw Piet Vryburg’s smiling face in the open door. I also saw the face of the girl at the airport, which surprised me. Except that now she was dressed in jungle fatigues and carrying a machine pistol. The pilot’s face I also recognized; he was the man on the floor of the car. There was another man, too. But this one I hadn’t seen before. He appeared Chinese.
“Christ, man,” said Piet, pumping my hand, “I see you!” His usual greeting. Africaans origins.
“And I see you, Piet, you son of a bitch.”
He was dressed in casual civilian clothes. I had only - ever - seen him in some kind of a uniform. The effect was unnerving. But the funny thing about Piet Vryburg, the man, was that I never felt odd meeting him again after long intervals, the way I did with other friends. Here was the same old Piet Vryburg from way back. Ebullient, full of life, a friend to the world in general. His blonde hair, sun-bleached white in places, was as unkempt as ever, and his face was still as tanned as a face could be without singeing. I felt bucked just seeing him again, and my first instinct was to take him off to some corner and chew the fat. He started going on about the flight, and how they had stayed clear of the weather, drifting in behind it, when the girl stepped over.
“Hello again, colonel McCann,” she interrupted, holding out her free hand. She had a wry smile on her face, as if she wanted me to comment on the amazing change the uniform made to her. I took the hand and again felt sandpaper. “Hi,” I said, not unkindly. “Come to see how the other half live?”
The smile disappeared. “This,” she said, indicating the stranger, “is Doctor Tung Sai Ping. You requested him, I believe.”
I shook hands with the man; a little guy who looked totally out of his depth. He wore a combat jacket that did not fit and boots that waggled as he walked. He carried the classic doctor’s bag in his left hand. “Well,” I said,”I certainly requested a doctor...Hello, doctor. Thanks for volunteering. I hope we don’t disappoint you too much.”
The man smiled nervously, bowed slightly the way they do, then retracted his sweating hand. He said not a word.
“He speaks little English, colonel,” said the girl. She was not apologizing. “And,” she added pointedly, “he did not volunteer. He is the estate’s resident physician. He will remain until mister Luang can find a permanent medic for you.”
I nodded. “Fair enough.” I did not actually anticipate needing the services of a fully fledged doctor at the camp - though several could be needed later, in a different place - but you never knew, and I had been caught once before; a bad tooth had robbed me of a fine scout and we had been forced to move against the Simba in unknown territory. We lost.
“I think you know this man,” the girl went on as the pilot jumped out of the chopper and loped over, ducking slightly beneath the still-turning rotors.
“Colonel,” acknowledged the Englishman,” It’s nice to meet you at the horizontal, so to speak.”
We shook hands. “What do I call you?” I asked.
“Jack’ll do, sport.” Not English, then. He was an Aussie. The accent, now that I listened for it, was obvious. “But I’ve been called worse.” He smiled.
The girl took an envelope from her breast pocket and handed it to me. “From mister Luang, colonel. Information regarding fresh contact schedules and some instructions for...for the future.” She then indicated the Kangatzi, who had crowded in around the aircraft, discussing it excitedly, pointing at lumps and orifices and wheels like a bunch of kids. “With your permission, we have some stores to unload.”
I nodded. “Help yourself...Incidentally,” I added as she turned away, “and correct me if I’m wrong. But do I get the impression that you think you’re staying here?” It was an impression that had just struck me.
She nodded. “I do so intent, colonel.”
I looked at Piet and he looked at me, eyebrows raised but his face purposefully blank of expression. He was saying; Yeah, I know! I went back to the girl. “I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible, miss...ah, miss Chan, was it?”
Her face went steely and her eyes looked like the proverbial pissholes in the snow. In a voice as cold as her expression, she said, “You will find confirmation in the envelope, colonel. And, for you
r information, I am not a..a miss anything!” The words clipped out like bullets. “I am a major in the Chinese Nationalist Army, and must be regarded as such.” She added, “You may totally disregard my...my gender. It is unimportant and irrelevant here.”
I couldn’t help chuckling. “It may be those things to you, miss, but you try and explain it to three hundred sex-starved mercenaries - black ones at that! They’d probably get a hell of a charge out of raping a major in the Chinese Nationalist Army.”
Piet looked at the ground as if he had just seen an ant of immense interest to him, whilst the doctor, if not fully understanding the words, appeared to get the gist. He slunk away to the far side of the chopper. The pilot found something of interest in my jeep.
The girl did not get red-in-the-face angry. She looked at me for a long moment with those nothing eyes. At last she said, “As of this moment, colonel, you may forget I exist.” The words came out like a computer simulation, jerkily but bright. “I am not here to get in your way, and I will not. I am here as an observer only. But I am here. And here I stay!”
I shook my head. I was no longer amused. “No dice! The last thing I want on my mind is some liberated - “
The air was suddenly filled with the rattle of her machine pistol. The Kangatzi scattered, throwing themselves at the weapons they had left on the edge of the clearing. Since I had seen it coming, I didn’t move. Nor did Piet. The pilot, however, who had been ferreting around in the jeep, leapt a mile in the air and came down flat on his face. The smoke billowed up around the girl as her magazine expended itself. The smoke canister, which had extinguished itself some minutes before, was no longer a smoke canister. Now it was a tubular colander, and thirty feet from where I had jammed it in the dirt, having been carried there on a stream of.287 bullets. I have to say that her marksmanship impressed. Her methods, however, left me colder than the Arctic. But before I could speak, she said, “Do not concern yourself about my safety, colonel. And resign yourself to the fact that I am here. I had hoped that - “
I was suddenly madder than all hell. I cut in, “The next time you slip the catch on that pop-gun... major!... you’d better be prepared to use it on me. Because I’ll wring your scrawny neck. You listening? No-one...not you, not comrade fucking Luang, not God Himself! goes “off-safety” unless I tell him to! Is that clear?”
We stared at each other like stand-off tigers. On the edge of my vision I could see the men, frozen in various attitudes, but all staring at the girl, their arms stretched towards their weapons. It might have seemed comical. Except that I did not feel comical.
Piet, his face turned away from the girl, whispered, “Let it go, Robbie.”
I shot him a glance, about to explode again. But I saw something in his eyes. I did not know what it was, but it was a warning of some kind. And Piet had never before interfered on professional matters. Certainly he had never tried to cool me out of an argument. Anyhow, for whatever reason, that split second of hesitation defused the tension in the air. The girl, quieter now, less stiltedly, said, “We understand each other, colonel. I am sure of that. And I apologize for the theatricals. But I am more than capable of looking after myself. My training, six months of it, was amongst a lot more than three hundred men. And they became just as sex-starved as any African can get. I deal with it as a fact of life, colonel. You may also be certain that I have no wish to be here. I was sent. I merely obey orders.”
Suddenly I didn’t care any more. If the men took it into their heads to give her a seeing-to, then good luck to them. Also, she had made a good argument. I said, “You are not my responsibility, major. If the men - “
She raised her hand. “I understand completely, colonel. There will be no trouble, believe me. I repeat, I have operated amongst troops since my teens. And...” Here she actually smiled a smile as she raised her arms sideways away from her body. “..do I look like something to be ravaged?”
Calmer now, I looked. What had fooled me, of course, was the memory of the way she had looked at the airport. Now there was no trace of make-up, and her hair was all but invisible beneath the forage cap. Her battle-dress, loose fitting and dirty, might have hung on a boy’s body. Certainly I could see no signs of her breasts. In fact, if anything, she looked flat-chested. The combat boots completed the image. I tried to picture her as the men would see her. I laughed. Her smile broadened as she asked, “What’s funny, colonel?”
“You’re right. You look like a boy.”
She nodded, satisfied. “There you are, then.”
I turned to Piet. “What’s the ratio of homo’s to sex-starved maniacs in a black mercenary outfit, Piet?”
Piet looked relieved. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, smiling. “About evens, I reckon. I’ve known some to go ape-shit for a young boy.”
The girls face reset itself in concrete. But I raised my own hand. “Okay, major. You stay. But you’re completely on your own. You don’t bother me, and I wont bother you. As for anything else...well, you’re on your own there, too. Clear?”
“Clear,” she agreed dully.
Incident over. I waved at the chopper and the men, who were picking themselves up. “Get your gear together.”
NINE
The trip back along the west track was worse than I thought it could be. Piet, sitting alongside me, was in the air as much as he was on his seat, and he had to grip the windscreen surrounds for grim death. What was happening in the back seat with the girl, the doctor and the pilot, I could not imagine; even if I’d the time or the inclination to think about it. The jeep bucked and slid crazily through the quagmire of the dripping, feebly lit jungle. I had my work cut out, even at the slow speed I tried to maintain, staying inside the flashes of red paint.
Where, before, the foot-thick crust of mud atop the clay had been substantially hard around the litter of rocks and boulders, disguising their presence in most cases, the recent downpour had exposed them completely. Plus, of course, Bjoran and his detail had not bothered to cut any growths below mud level, so we were constantly hitting branches and roots as well as the rocks. The main problem was that a certain amount of power was needed to lift the jeep over the larger boulders; power that worked against me the instant the rear wheels fell back into the mud. And to keep adjusting engine revs so minutely, on a platform that was bucking about all over the place, was the height of impossibility. The whole business had to be a delicate compromise in conditions that forbade delicacy. Also, according to the law of perversity, when the front wheels of the jeep - regardless of what was under the rear axle at the time - kicked sideways off an obstruction, it was on a portion of adverse camber! Several times already disaster had only narrowly been averted, and then only by chance itself, in the form of another boulder or root arresting the slide. At the wheel of an unsteerable, unstoppable machine, I had been powerless to do anything but hope. But we ploughed on, deeper and deeper into the swamps, seeing nothing but those life-saving glimmers of red reflected light.
Well over four hours later I skidded the jeep to a halt at the western perimeter of Camp-One. We were all of us covered in a thick layer of slimy mud. The jeep floor space was awash with the stuff. Go alone knows what we must have looked like, but Brook, who saw us come in, did not know which of the apparitions was me. He saluted the pilot.
“Christ, sir,” he said to the Aussie, “that bad, was it?”
I said, “This is me, here. And yes, it was...Okay, you lot, blow!” That last to a group of men who had gathered to see the new intake. “Where is everybody?”
Brook turned to me, smiling. “Well, sir, Bjoran is out at the river with Blue section, or most of it. Target drill.” Brook, in continuance of his methods, had split the force into three sections; Blue, Red and Yellow. And these sections were each divided into sub-sections; Red-one and -two, Blue-one and -two and so on. He had talked it over with me first, of course, and left to myself I would probably have done the same, in a roundabout way. But he seemed to have a knack for organization so I let
him get on with it. “Augarde is sorting out the armory. Hell fire, sir! You look bloody weird!”
“I feel weird.” I said, adding, “Lay on some water to - “
He cut in. “I’ve got a sort of a shower rigged up, sir. Over by the latrine pits. You can be the first customers.” He glanced around at the others, who were trying, without much success, to wipe the mud from their eyes.
I said, “Introductions later, Brook. Let’s give this shower of yours a bench test. Oh,” I added, “You’d better make other arrangements for this one.” I pointed to the girl, who didn’t even look like a boy any more. “This one’s a female.”
“What!” Brook exclaimed, stepping forward and peering hard at the mud-caked figure.
I waited to see if our major of the Chinese Nationalist Army would insist upon equal treatment in the shower. She said nothing.
The story of how Piet Vryburg and I became friends is an odd one. We first saw each other over gun sights!
At the time, I was commanding one of Joshua Nkomo’s “Quick-Strike” commando based at Zumbo, on the Lago de Cahora; a lake-like section of the Zambezi, over the Rhodesian border in Mozambique. Piet commanded a mercenary company that was only loosely attached to Ian Smith’s Department of Defense. His base, on the slopes of Mount Darwin, some 200 kays north-east of Salisbury, had been strategically placed to counter our sorties into the area. We knew of each other then, but had never come face to face. I had been trying to get him for as long as he had been after my blood.
During an action close to the Ruya River I finally got a bead on him, at a distance of some three hundred yards. A second later, and he might have turned the tables. As it was I managed to send a round into his chest and he went down. I was as pleased as Punch! He didn’t die - of course - and we took him back with us to Zumbo hospital where, a prisoner of “war," he began to recover. I dropped in on him out of curiosity one day and was surprised to find that we had a mutual friend; “Cat” Souchet. We talked a lot after that. There were no hard feelings. We were both mercenaries, and “Cat” was a solid link. I saw to it that he was spared the misery and cruelty of Nkomo’s notorious “Enemies of Freedom” camp in Magoe, arranging that he instead be kept in the relative comfort of the Zumbo guardhouse.